Treasure Sweeper

Author Comments

P. Booty has got his hands on a stolen treasure map. Find all the treasures before he gets caught!

Treasure sweeper is a minesweeper game with a twist. Instead of tagging mines, you dig treasures. Retrieve all the treasures before time runs out to win.

Click or use arrows keys to move. Press SPACE or click the pirates shovel and then chose a tile to dig. Stepping on a tile with buried treasure will cause you to lose 1 life. Numbers on tiles tell you how many tiles with buried treasures that tile is touching. Pick up powerups to boost your score.

Reviews

This is a nice game. The graphics are decent and the sound effects are nice as well. The gameplay is definitely was inspired by Minesweeper (a game at which I was pretty good once), but you added your own ideas (digging up treasures, instead of flagging mines). So Minesweeper only acts as an inspiration to this game.

The gameplay itself is pretty simple. Click to walk, press Space to dig. But a good game doesn't need to be overly complex (just think about Tetris, for example). Often it's the more simple games that are the most enjoyable. Treasure Sweeper is an enjoyable game and it's simple controls make it a good game to waste some time with it, like during the lunch break or when you have nothing else to do at the moment.

The game seemed to be pretty enjoyable. Only thing that bothered me was less time and more treasure to dig as I progressed into the game. At least you can find clocks that help boost the time limit giving a little extra time to finding all the treasure.

As far as graphics go I like the old video game style look given to it. The only time it didn't look that way was when the statistics screen came up at the end of the level showing how much profit you had made from treasure found, lives remaining, and time remaining. The biggest money giver was usually the time left over which made finding clocks a lot funner to do.

One thing that I didn't like about the game play was when I had a numbered tile a "?" right next to it. Mostly since from time to time I would begin to dig it and it would show red on where I was digging meaning there was no treasure. I think it would have been nice to be able to cancel a dig meaning you don't have to dig up whatever may be there, whether it be a broken vase, Minecraft block, or some sock looking items. It would help save a bit of time during game play.

The background things such as the whales, octopus, and fish made the game seem relaxing.

The music was actually pretty nice and looped perfectly since you never notice when it restarts. Sounds a bit like a polka loop of sorts. Care to tell me what the name of the song is being used?

Overall, aside from wishing I could stop digging as soon as I see red in the little bar, the game is great.

If you could stop digging right away, there would be no consequence to digging in the wrong spot. But you're not the only one who has mentioned it, so I still think you're on to something. Perhaps there is a less annoying way I could have penalized players for digging in the wrong spot. Hmm...

The ingame music is: http://incompetech.com/m/c/royalty-free/index.html?keywords=itty+bitty
Our audio superstar turned it into a looping segment.

Enjoyable game with a good foundation to improve on. I do like the twist on the minesweeper formula as well as the graphical style, but once you go through the three maps, there's not much left to it.

More set maps would be nice for a sequel, as well as the untimed casual mode using randomly generated maps or maps generated based on parameters set by the user (map size, number of treasures, etc) would be a huge boost to the longevity of the game. On an untimed mode though, considering the challenge is based on penalizing you for digging in the wrong spots and taking damage from traps, it would be easy for people to game the system and just dig all around a clue until they find it. You may want to consider a way to avoid that, like dig three incorrect spots in a row and you lose.